How Long Does Tumblr's $85 Million Last?

by Choire SichaSeptember 26, 2011

$85 million sounds like a lot of money! That’s what Tumblr just raised, on top of the $30 million they raised ten months ago, bringing their investment dollars to a bit north of $120 million. There’s a staff of 50 (now only 82% male!), so that’s like $5 million a year right there. (Also, they’ve outsourced tech support (rather poorly; if you ask Tumblr for help with something, you get some dude copying and pasting a manual at you) with some minimal supervision, and that’s probably a significant, if user-annoying, cost savings.) But staff costs are surely dwarfed by the cost of doing at the very least 156 billion pageviews a year, particularly when those pageviews are mostly “borrowed” copyrighted high-res images of cats and/or starving girls. (That cost is the joy of being an actual tech company, not a “media company.”) By very back-of-the-envelope calculations, Tumblr’s adorable own neighborhood in some cute server farm costs a lot more than that. So by necessity, they’ll be rolling out the “how we will make money” plan in 2012. Somewhere at Tumblr HQ, there’s a graph where a red line of money being spent points down and a blue (or maybe green????) line of “projected revenue” points up. Hmm, hey, HOW ABOUT COUPONS? I hear coupons are hot right now.